For many years grain crops, such as wheat, oats, corn and the like, have been harvested by automatic harvesting or picking machines. Such machines have resulted in a substantial reduction of the man hours required to harvest a crop. As a result, a single farmer now is capable of farming large acreages which were unheard of in the labor intensive farming industry at the turn of the century.
While large-scale mechanized farming operations are commonplace in the grain farming regions of the world, particularly in the United States and Canada, vegetable farming generally is a labor intensive business. Most vegetables are harvested by hand, which requires a large number of workers per acre of crop to accomplish the harvesting since the crop generally has only a very short time (a matter of a very few days) in most cases when it is at its peak for harvesting. As labor costs continuously increase, the costs of vegetables produced on such farms continues to rise accordingly.
Efforts to alleviate the high cost of labor in harvesting vegetable crops have resulted in some mechanical harvesting machines. Mechanical harvesting of beans and peas has been accomplished relatively efficiently by the use of machines which take the bean or pea plant and run it through counter-rotating beaters or a single rotating beater formed by a number of extending beater fingers rotated at relatively high speed about a central shaft in the machine. The beater fingers knock the beans or peas from the remainder of the plant. In the case of a pea picking machine, the beaters also burst open the pea pods; so that the peas fall out of the pods. In a pea picking machine, the peas are permitted to fall through appropriately sized meshes from which the peas are conveyed to a storage bin. The remainder of the plant is blown away by a blower or other suitable apparatus and discarded.
Bean picking machines operate in a similar manner, and separation of the leaves and stem portions of the bean plants from the beans themselves is accomplished in various ways in such machines. These machines, however, in most cases effectively destroy the plant; so that if a second crop is desired, it is necessary to replant the field for the purpose of producing such a second crop.
Some bean picking and pea picking machines are operated with an intent to preserve the plant. The use of brushes and beater fingers in such machines, however, results in the stripping of a large number of leaves from the plant. In addition, branches and stems of the plant are frequently broken. As a result, the condition of the plant after the harvesting machine has passed over it is substantially weakened. In many cases, the plant is damaged to such an extent that it is incapable of producing a second crop.
Even though mechanized harvesting machines have been used with some degree of success for picking beans and peas, mechanized picking machines for peppers (such as green and red chiles, bell peppers and the like) and tomatoes capable of harvesting the crop, without damaging it or destroying the plant or both, have not been developed. Several attempts have been made to utilize some of the principles employed in bean picking and pea picking machines to adapt such machines for the picking of peppers and tomatoes, but these attempts have met with failure. As a consequence, it has been the practice in the raising of peppers and tomatoes to harvest the crop by hand. The cost per acre of harvesting these crops is a significant factor in the ultimate market price.
Accordingly, it is desirable to harvest the crops from pepper plants and tomato plants with a mechanized harvesting machine. Such a machine ideally should harvest the crop without damage to the crop itself (since if the peppers or tomatoes are broken or bruised they are practically unmarketable). In addition the machine, to the extent possible, should leave the plant in a strong and healthy condition after the harvesting operation; so that the plant can be used to produce subsequent crops. This is particularly desirable in the case of plants growing chile peppers and the like, where a plant may be used to produce as many as three or four different crops in a growing season before it is necessary to replant the field with new plants. If a mechanized harvesting machine is not capable of leaving the plants in a healthy condition for the production of subsequent crops, its value is substantially reduced since it then would be necessary to replant the entire crop after each harvesting operation.